Flying on empty: Manned space program could be in trouble

Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Published 5:30 am, Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The signals coming from a presidential commission compiling recommendations for the future of NASA's manned space program are alarming, particularly for communities like Houston that have a large economic stake riding on the outcome.

At a public meeting in Washington last week in preparation for delivering its final report to the White House later this month, members of the 10-person Human Space Flight Plans Committee said the space agency lacks the financial fuel to support efforts to put astronauts on the moon and Mars in the relatively near future. As they whittled down the potential options for President Barack Obama, comments were grim.

According to commission chairman Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin CEO, “Our view is that it will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in the human space flight area.”

Panel member and former astronaut Sally Ride concurred. “So far, we haven't found a scenario that includes exploration that's viable.”

As diagrammed by the commission, NASA's current time lines for developing the $81 billion Constellation program, including a new generation of Ares rockets to propel the Orion crew exploration vehicle, are unrealistic.

President George W. Bush set a goal of 2020 to return Americans to the moon, and to Mars by mid-century. According to the commission, without a large boost in its budget, NASA won't even have the necessary hardware to launch a deep-space mission until 2028. According to Ride, “If you're willing to wait until 2028, you've got a heavy-lift vehicle, but you've got nothing to lift. You cannot do this program on this budget.”

Current plans to decommission the space shuttle fleet next year would leave the U.S. without its own means to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. That would put us in the embarrassing position of having to pay old space-program rival Russia for lifts to and from orbit.

Unless it changes course, NASA also currently plans to end its involvement with the $100 billion station in 2016, only six years after its scheduled completion, and dump it in the South Pacific. The other international partners in the venture, including Russia, Japan and the European Union, understandably want to keep the station functioning until at least 2020.

The Augustine commission is presuming that both the shuttle and space station will have extended life spans, which reduces further the amount of money available for Constellation and other new programs.

The committee is preparing a handful of long-term options for NASA, including a revamped schedule for landing on the moon, as well as potential missions to near-Earth asteroids, and perhaps the moons of Mars rather than landing on the planet itself.

While all the options are meant to point toward eventually landing astronauts on Mars, Augustine said that “to go direct to Mars with today's technology and money is riskier than we would want to be associated with.”

“It likely would not succeed,” said Augustine.

Without a long-term commitment to boost the inadequate NASA budget, the U.S. will find itself sitting on the sidelines, its manned space program on hold while China pursues plans to send missions beyond low Earth orbit.

With the Ares 1-X rocket poised for its first test launch in October, America must not repeat the Apollo era blunder of going to the moon and then allowing that program and capability to die.

Manned space exploration is a potent technological and economic stimulus as well as a key aspect of national security. Even in these troubled financial times, it is an investment we can't afford not to make.